Eating our own weight in sugar.

Australians are eating their way through the 2.5 billion dollar Sugar cane industry causing serious health implications explains Kathleen O’Connor.

The average Australian consumes approximately 40 kilograms of refined sugar a year. That’s over 8000 teaspoons of pure sugar.

Being in such a dangerous category, we are well on our way to serious health issues, even early death.

According to a recent report by the World Health Organisation, people should be consuming six teaspoons a day for optimal health.

The average Australian currently eats over 40 teaspoons of sugar a day- almost 7 times the recommended dietary amount.

Nutrition Australia Dietitian Zoe Taylor explains sugar is okay in moderation and it’s not just the undisclosed sugars in nutritious foods that we need to worry about.

“We recommend cutting back on the ‘obvious’ sugar foods such as sugary drinks (soft drinks, sports drinks and fruit juices), confectionary, cakes, biscuits and chocolate to just 12 teaspoons a day,” she says.

There are added sugars in almost everything we eat, people need to monitor and cut back on the obvious sugars incorporated into most diets.

“We need to include whole foods from the five core foods groups like vegetables, fruit and wholegrain foods. For most people, making these changes will automatically reduce the amount of sugar you are consuming, and boost your nutrient intake too” Taylor says.

Sugar is a carbohydrate our body uses as an essential energy source.

Studies show that sugar has big role to play in our overall wellbeing.

Glucose is a type of sugar that the human body needs in moderation. When we are consuming too much, our organs neutralise the high sugar levels converting the sugar into fat.

Australians are one of the top Twenty-five countries in the world suffering from obesity. Obesity is caused by fast food and overeating any product. Studies now show that sugar also has a big role to play.

“If people don’t reduce the amount the free sugars in their diet, poor health will continue to plague the world,” explains spokesperson for the WHO.

Free sugars are the more obvious types of sugar in our diet. Products we consider a ‘junk food’ like chocolate, soft drinks and lollies — are all examples of free sugars.

As sugar is becoming cheaper and easier to produce, it is put in more products we buy.

Health professionals agree that we are facing a public health crisis with the increasingly toxic amounts of sugar in foods.

If we continue to eat the amounts of sugar at the rate we do, it will have fatal consequences.